Social Pressure

It has become habitual to think of the social as immaterial or unphysical, as something which does not enter into or physically affect the body. Despite the strong evidence of psychosomatic disorders, or the logical deductions that follow from the facts that words and images are physical entities as well as conveyors of meaning, social theory continues to think the relation between the physical and the social in terms where either the biological may (some claim) or may not determine the social, but where the social does not have material effects on the body. In other words, the only alternative to sociobiology,1 which misconceives and reduces the relation at issue to one of biological determination, appears to be a social without physical materiality.

The theory of social physicality I have developed2 is premised on the notion that the opposition between the social and the biological is itself misconceived to the extent that it conjures up an idea of the social as immaterial, as lacking matter and/or energy.3 The opposition between the social and the biological was built into sociology's foundations: Durkheim for instance, as Giddens has it, is concerned with “the specific characteristics of the class of phenomena which may be delimited as ‘social’ and thereby separated from other categories such the ‘biological’ and ‘psychological’” (Giddens 1971, 86). But while I agree that the social is specific to itself and independent of biology, and that it also exists independently of personal psychology, the social as I will define an aspect of it here (which we will call “social pressure”) is nonetheless physical. Moreover it is not that the biological determines the social. It is rather that the physicality of the social enters into